My endorsements/votes

Tomorrow there will, I expect, be a post commenting on the Romney/Obama debate scheduled for tonight. But until then, I'm going ti use this blog to present my positions on the various candidates and questions that I will be voting on in a month.

Unfortunately, living in Maryland, my vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan whll probably have no effect. Because of the electoral college, my vote will be submerged by a huge Obama-Biden majority. But Romney and Ryan get my vote and my endorsement, and I'm hoping that enough people in the states where it does matter will vote that way.

Likewise, my candidates for both houses of Congress have little chance of winning, and my vote will be largely symbolic. Dan Bongino would be a major improvement over the incumbent, Ben Cardin, and I wish he had a real chance to win the Senate seat. (There is also an independent, Rob Sobhani, who used to be a Republican, and has some merit; unfortunately, since we don't have a system of approval voting, all Sobhani can hope to do is steal a few votes from Bongino and help Cardin win big.) For the House of Representatives, I am still in the 8^th District, and though the recent gerrymandering of the Maryland House Districts has made it less solidly Democratic than it used to — Gov. O'Malley has attempted to force Roscoe Bartlett out of his 6^th District seat by moving some Democratic areas into it from the 8^th — I am certain that Ken Timmerman has no chance to beat Chris Van Hollen — no matter how much I'd love to see Van Hollen kicked out of the House.

There are also elections for school board positions, but as I have said, I don't vote in those, and there will be Nazi-style elections for judicial seats (Back in New York, of course, all the parties would co-endorse the same candidate, so you often had no choice, but in Maryland there aren't even the fictions of elections with an apparent choice for judicial elections.)

Now we get to the ballot questions.There are seven of them that will be voted on statewide, though it is laughable that we get to vote on the first two. Apparently the qualifications for Orphan's Court judges in each county are set in the State Constitution, so when they are to be changed in one county, everyone in the State gets to vote on the question. Question 1 (regarding Prince George's County) and Question 2 (regarding Baltimore County) will be on the ballot this year; I can't see why people in the other twenty-plus counties even get to vote on these questions, and I intend to abstain on both, as I did in a similar case two years ago.

Question 3 is also a State Constitutional amendment, though one that makes more sense than the first two: It apparently responds to a recent case in the county next door where a County Council member convicted of a crime stayed on the council for a while, because Maryland law permitted her to do so until the actual sentence was laid down. Under Question 3, as soon as an official would be found guilty, they would be removed from office. I don't have strong feelings about this, but I will probably vote for Question 3.

Then there are the questions that will really get people's attention. Question 4 is Maryland's version of the DREAM Act, giving illegals in-state rates on tuition at public colleges. As I have said before, I will vote — and urge others to vote — against Question 4. Similarly, I have indicated that my intention is to vote against Question 5, which implements the particularly egregious gerrymander I mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, whose main purpose is to ensure a 7-1 Democratic majority in the Maryland delegation to the House of Representatives. But Question 6, to allow same-sex marriage, is one I support. I will vote — and urge others to vote — for Question 6, and in addition, for Question 7, about which I have said little so far.

Question 7 expands the law to allow an additional casino in Maryland. It is being supported by commercial interests that hope to own such a casino, and opposed by those who already own casinos — or plan to — that would lose traffic to a new one. My own position is that having the State collect a share of gambling money is preferable to raising taxes on everyone — you can avoid this siphoning of money out of your pocket simply by not gambling! Some people point to compulsive gamblers being put at risk, but just because there are alcoholics we do not ban liquor sales! (We tried once — it didn't work!)

In short, my endorsements:

President and Vice-President: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

United States Senate from Maryland: Dan Bongino.

United States House of Representatives from the 8^th District of Maryland: Ken Timmerman.

Questions 1 and 2: ABSTAIN.

Questions 3, 6, and 7: FOR.

Questions 4 and 5: AGAINST.

A follow-up to the endorsement of Bongino for Senate

I was just looking at Dan Bongino's website. Interestingly, I can't even tell from it his positions on the “social issues.” But actually, that's the way it should be.

Dan Bongino is running on the right issues. The things that need to be fixed in this country. No need to reconsider — I'm supporting him for the Senate. Read his stands at this site.

Dan Bongino for Senator

In this area, a lot of areas have these events (usually called “Taste of …” and the name of the area in question) where you can sample food from a lot of nearby restaurants. Yesterday was “Taste of Wheaton,” and I went there. Besides the food tables, there were a couple of rows of other tables, put up by various organizations: nonprofits, County agencies, commercial establishments, and both major parties. In fact, they put the Republicans' table right across the way from the Democrats' — whether on purpose or not. (Most people thought this was deliberate!) I went over to the Republicans' table, and by the table was Dan Bongino, the candidate in this year's election for Senator from Maryland. I hadn't supported Bongino in the primary, and I knew very little about him (except that I was likely to support any Republican against our incumbent, Ben Cardin), so I began the conversation asking why I should support him. I did not say anything about my own political beliefs, because I did not want him to know which issues he needed to emphasize to get my support. (I don't, as you who read this blog regularly would know, like the “social conservative” positions taken by many Rrpublican candidates these days, though I would vote for someone who self-identified as a social conservative against a Ben Cardin if social conservatism was not his chief issue.) Bongino's response, however, kept me quite satisfied. He began talking about reducing Government's impact on our lives — the kind of libertarian appeal with which I strongly agree. He then mentioned economic matters and the ineffectiveness of Ben Cardin (who has almost no legislation that he has sponsored among the laws). He never mentioned any of the social issues, and the campaign literature he handed me was similarly oriented toward economic matters and Bongino's qualifications. I certainly feel comfortable, on the basis of my conversation with him and his campaign literature, supporting Dan Bongino for Senator from Maryland.